


Play It Again

by RatherxIntense



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Blood and Gore, Broken Families, Character Study, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Many Content Warnings Apply, Original Character-centric, Psychopathology & Sociopathy, Serial Killers, mentions of animal abuse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-14
Updated: 2019-04-14
Packaged: 2020-01-13 08:31:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18465277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RatherxIntense/pseuds/RatherxIntense
Summary: Runs canonically with "Entries." A study of the monster that haunts Outer Vegas, and the single survivor who haunts him back.





	Play It Again

**Author's Note:**

> Hello. It should be noted that this work includes some very heavy topics and is not for sensitive readers. While there is no explicit content included, there will be a lot of disturbing moments and allusions to real-world psychopaths. Please keep that in mind.

The Fiends were bitches. All of them bitches. Hector had sheltered tonight in a concrete stairway adjacent to their sputtering campfires and collapsing forts, and they had left him well alone. Until he was asleep.

He awoke to the clatter of a pulse grenade against the floor. Assuming it was the lethal variety, he slung the thing downstairs with a snarl. Once he had heaved up to his knees and witnessed the blue pulse of electric energy that lit the walls, he only began to feel angry.

Not angry, he realized, seizing the railway rifle from under his bedroll. Furious. Furious at his fool neighbors for their failure to even _try_ killing him right. Teaching them would be simple enough, he decided, as the first psycho decked in rags and bones stumbled around the corner, and he punched a hole in her chest. Rather, _correcting_ them would do. Another followed behind her – they hardly ever had the balls to fight alone – and Hector shot a rail spike straight to his intestines. The rifle rattled and groaned as Hector readied another spike, and he chuckled deeply against the folds of fat around his neck. The noises felt like a friend giving a punch line, and the joke was death.

“I think the rest of you got to come down here,” he called up to where the stairs met the road. “Missy here might be dead by now.” He shoved the downed Fiend with his boot. “And Ol’ Hector wants to make sure _all_ her friends get to join after her.”

The Fiends charged down at him in blind, intoxicated anger, and five rail spikes later, Hector was crouched by his bedroll again, picking caps and chems from the pockets of his dead assailants. The ripe notes of death – mostly blood and waste – began wafting up at him, and he wrinkled his pockmarked nose, drawing up a red-stained collar to cover it.

Something between the teeth of a dead Fiend was gleaming in the dull evening light. Hector wrenched it free and held it to his eye. Another cap – no, a coin. Silvery and mottled with tooth marks. The Fiend must have made a habit of chewing it.

Hector strained his single eye further, until it was just a black bead ringed with wrinkled flesh. He could just read the letters around the rim of the coin. _CAESAR…DICTATOR._

He snickered, a cruel sound, and pressed his lips to the words. Then he took the soft metal between his massive jaws and tore it in two.

Daisy said that as a baby, Hector was an incorrigible biter. When she had been five years old and him barely able to talk, he would snap down on her fingers with all his freakish force and laugh when she ran to tell their parents. Pain had been a game to him since before he understood what pain was. As a sturdy little boy, fed full of corn and brahmin steak, he would chase down the farm animals and sink in his teeth just to feel their fear.

Their mother worried that there were rads in the meat, and Hector had always devoured more than a normal boy’s portion. Maybe rads could explain the distance in his clouded, black eyes, the vacancy. Maybe it could explain the girth of his jawbone, and the fire-like crackle that it made when little Hector would grit his restless teeth in anger.

But surely if their boy was suffering, then the people they supplied would suffer, also. There would be an uproar from the settlements that enjoyed their product, and the NCR government would send an inspector. No such inspector had ever visited their quiet farm. Still, Hector’s mother had stood at the kitchen counter each night with a slice of steak in her mouth, eyes closed, _hoping_ to taste something wrong. To have that explanation. It was their stock that had to be wrong, not their son….

And then Daisy would come screaming inside, crying into her apron. What had her brother done now?

_Bitches,_ Hector thought, still chewing. He stood, stepping on corpses as he left the stairwell, bedroll slung over his shoulder. Beside him, an eyebot listed over the roadside, and the tune of _Johnny Guitar_ began to follow him From a distance, as he walked the sands, he might seem like nothing more than a lonely waster.

Hector was certainly different. He lived on the tastes of blood and metal. Tasting the coin, he remembered a similar sensation from a certain violent night.

Blood had spilled from his own cut tongue, and trailed between his lips from where his eye socket wept red. His other eye had squinted up blearily at the midnight wastes, the single, desperate trail of bare footsteps in the sand, and the boy who made them, still running.

_Wool-pace. Wool-pace_. His name was like a gust of wind, and he ran like it too.

Hector understood running – the freedom it brought. When the cazadors began nesting, the hum of their wings a constant, distant warning that nature had come back to take his family’s farm, he had wanted to run.

On the night he left, his father had smashed one of his nicest handmade hunting traps on the ground.

“Daddy, you touch my things again, I blast your brains with your own damn shotgun.”

The angry old fingers that held a second trap turned tired, shakily so. Hector’s graying father had lost the will to fight some years ago, when his son’s rampant growth spurts had turned him into a giant of a boy. He just had to be reminded at times.

“The farm needs you, Hector,” he pleaded. “There’s things we can’t afford anymore. We need your help.”

“I’m sick of you,” Hector said. He went about snatching food from the cabinets, stuffing his jacket with little cartons full of shells. His traps were taken too, and the silver jars his mother had dug up to pay for taxes that year. The shotgun went over his shoulder, and strapped on his arm was his sister’s best piece of salvage: a Pip Boy 3000.

Hector still didn’t understand half the things that the Pip Boy could do, but it made for a handy holotape player. For days, he had walked the wastes north of his family’s ranch, seeking the “city of vice” that had beckoned to him through faded posters and travelers’ gossip. Late each lonely night, he would make camp in the shadow of a billboard or a broken car; he would load one of his mother’s holotapes into the Pip Boy, and its soft, tinny music would lull him to sleep.

By now, living on the violent fringes of his sinful promise land, Hector had recorded several holotapes of his own. Their music was only his to relish.

Still walking, he could see flickers of sunrise overtop the Mojave hills. He loaded a tape into the Pip Boy, and sat in a derelict trailer to watch faint pinks and reds begin to slither through the clouds. A tumbleweed rustled by, and then from the speaker on his wrist came a string of violin notes, slow and sweet as the sunrise itself.

Hector’s slab of a brow grew angry lines. He popped out the tape and chucked it through the door to the cracked pavement. Rifling in his jacket, he produced a different tape. It was his own fault for not labeling them, he figured, but he enjoyed the thrill of not knowing whose voice he might hear singing from that little speaker – igniting his memories.

Would it be the scavenger girl whose throat he cut in a Red Rocket station? Would it be the lost NCR trooper who’d kept crawling with two severed limbs? The trader whose wolfish smile he’d reduced to a toothless, tongueless void? The pretty bartender who’d had no other customers that night, or the gambler, or the ranch hand, or the dancer….

Or would it be the one who got away?

Hector didn’t need a holotape to remember his voice. His flat, articulate speech had felt so foreign amidst the backwoods drawls and mixed-up city jargon of Freeside. He spoke of “Kai zar” and “Ken tur ees” in a way both subdued and religiously reverent. Hector had yearned to put fear in that voice, to hear it broken and clogged with blood.

He was halfway there when the fucker tore his eye from his face.

Listening now, Hector felt at the leather patch on his socket. He had made it himself, flayed the hide from the flesh of a wriggling young gecko and stitched it to fit his gruesome lump of a head.

Stitching was the one thing that Daisy had succeeded in teaching him. He had fixated on the needle in her hand, eager to puncture something himself. When she had confronted him on the night he was to leave, he had fantasized, as he always had, about sticking those needles in her stuck-up little face.

“Are you really gonna leave us behind?” She had asked him, shivering in the rain. Her arms shook, but she didn’t once pick up her feet from the threshold of mud between fencepost and fencepost. He hadn’t replied, only spat on her, and then he was fixed with a stone gaze that held no anger or surprise – nothing but exhaustion from years upon years of the same.

Hector had been forced to push Daisy aside – no amount of threatening or disrespect had managed to dislodge her. He pushed her aside now from his memories, refocusing on the little speaker at his wrist. The voice he knew too well – the one who got away.

“Hector, please, Hector…I wish to live…please….” The words came soft, cut short in that tight, scared throat. Hector rewound the tape. _Play it again, Johnny Guitar._

There was never a man like him. Not even when Hector played the tape for other victims and made them recite it piece by piece. Not when he staked their lives on doing it just right. He would wander for years, feeling the pain and terror of others, and until he found that one single survivor, that one steel-voiced runaway, Hector knew that nothing would sate him.

The dented little eyebot drifted by his trailer, bringing along the distant voice of Peggy Lee. How many times it would repeat that damn song, Hector didn’t know. _There was never a man…._

Hector pulled out the tape. Debated for the dozenth time if he should just smash it in his fist and forget. Try.

But his other hand moved to his face. The wound that would never leave him. He remembered looking down at his eye – _looking_ -at-his- _eye_ , smashed and useless on his apartment floor – and he had clutched his face in the fury of knowing that those thin fingers had dug between bone and flesh, and snapped his optic nerve like a rubber band.

Dawn had arrived. Hector hated the sun. He slapped his bedroll down on the trailer floor and made an attempt to sleep. Of course, the wasteland never could seem to leave him undisturbed.

Footsteps from the roadside made him blink fully awake. Hector shrugged on his jacket and kept the bag with his rifle close at hand, peering a single, angry black eye from the trailer door.

A wastelander with short, black hair and a varmint rifle in his arms looked back, and jumped.

“It’s…you!”

“And what you mean by that,” Hector said.

“You’re Daisy’s brother, right? Knew I could find you,” the waster said, sounding proud of himself. “She sent me to see if you’d come home, Hector.”

“Who’re you.”

“Her boyfriend.” The pride seemed to turn a bit malicious, almost mocking. “We’re running the farm since her Daddy passed on. It’s better than before, but we could use your help. Daisy said you’d have gone to Outer Vegas, and I’d say she was right about you. But she’s hoping you’ve had a change of heart.”

_Change…of…heart_. Hector’s mind churned over the words with the heat and fury of molten lava. His heart would never change; it would thrive on others’ blood and beat itself wild for torture and murder alone. It beat now at the prospect of making “Daisy’s boyfriend” scream his last and gush blood from that arrogant mouth.

But Hector kept his face blank. His brow-slab un-knotted, his single eye eerily calm against the morning sunlight. Years of practice had taught him never to rush a fresh shot at killing.

“Yeah, you could say I’ve changed,” he said.


End file.
